Check Out The Windows Experience Index Share Site

Have you heard about the Windows Experience Index Share site?

WEI Share is a open source WPF application that takes your systems Windows Experience Index score and shares it with others who visit the site.

You might ask why share your WEI on the site – well there are two reasons:

• WEIShare enables you to go and compare what computers get for their WEI scores. Having thousands of machines WEI scores is a great reference point for customers shopping for a new PC.
• WEI scores, i.e. a computer’s speed, are dependent on the quality of the drivers. Sometimes WEI scores go up, sometimes they go down. WEIShare will allow you to see which drivers have the best performance on your machine.

WEI Share also lets you post your score on Facebook for bragging rights if you have an account there and they plan to add Twitter at some point as well.  Along with plans for an OData feed and other improvements this is will be a very handy site.

You can already download the source code which is available at http://weishare.codeplex.com/.

Now I heard about this site directly from its developer – Larry Larsen who is a Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft working in Developer Platform Evangelism (DPE).

We did a brief interview via email and I asked him two key questions.

Why did you decide to develop this application/website?

When it came time to get a new laptop, I looked all over for a list of WEI scores for various systems. There are lots of benchmarks for videocards and processors, but WEI is a good (fast) system for getting a general idea of performance across the 5 areas scored. I thought the best way to collect scores would be if we all saved them to the cloud. Being able to pull driver versions lets you see which drivers have the best scores.

Why give the source code away for this project?

Helping developers is in our DNA so there was never a question of it being free and open source. It uses Azure, WPF, and Silverlight, so there’s a wide variety of code. The company that I worked with on WEI Share, 352Media, is putting together an article on how it was built that will be on Coding4Fun.com soon.

Perfect – just what developers and programmers do. Identify a need and create something to fulfill it. Then they share it with the world. Sweet!

Visit WEISHare.net and upload your own WEI Score.  Feel free to link to your results in the comments.

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Richard Hay  (3358 Posts)

Richard is the Owner of WindowsObserver.com and has been involved in tech for over 25 years. His first website – AnotherWin95.com – came online in 1995. Back then he used GeoCities Web Hosting for it and what you see here today is the result of the work he has continued on the site since 1995. In January 2010 his community contributions were recognized by Microsoft when he was awarded the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for Windows Desktop Experience. In January 2011 he was renewed as a Microsoft MVP but in a new category called Windows Expert - Consumer and in January 2012 he received the award for the third time.